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If the pages have already been published you'll want to use a 301 redirect as that will transfer all links and their SEO benefit from the old URL to the new URL (FYI, a small amount of of PageRank and link value is lost).

By doing this on the server side you won't trigger Google Analytics to track the old URL. However, if you do want to use Google Analytics to track those redirects you will need to use client side redirects.

My issue is more or less just ease of use: example.com/keyword is easier to remember than example.com/long-url/article/keyword/index.html. So I am wondering what the best way is to accomplish this?
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mmundiffOct 18 '11 at 15:05

If the long URLs already exist, any of the above methods will work fine as you will not lose the value of any links you have acquired thus far. If you haven't published this content yet, you can use mod_rewrite which will not involve any redirecting. I'll add an example of that now.
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John Conde♦Oct 18 '11 at 15:12